Word count changes when highlighting text

Question

I am currently experiencing the same problem. I am using Microsoft word for Mac to write my MA thesis, and am having some seriously bizarre situations with my word count. 

Today it jumped from 15,400 words down to 14,900 out of nowhere, and when I retraced my steps by undoing typing, I found that it happened entirely through the action of highlighting some text in a footnote and changing the font colour to red to remind myself to edit later. 

I tried doing it again on another footnote just to double check, and the same drop in word count occurred. Could this be a bug?

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

Katie

[New question split by moderator from a different question regarding word count in an old version of Word

word count fail - Microsoft Community

Answer 1

I've never heard of what you've described, nor is there any logical reason why changing font color should have any effect on Word Count... AFAIK there just is no connection between the two. Also, in some brief testing I'm unable to reproduce it here. Usually, erratic word count is the result of unresolved changes being tracked in the document.

Before chasing symptoms, though:

1. Make sure Office 2011 is fully updated - 14.4.2 is current
2. Run Disk Utility to repair disk permissions then Restart your Mac.

If this persists, more information will be needed:

• Are you going by Tools> Word Count or Live Word Count in the Status Bar?
• Is Track Changes in use in the document?
• Are you certain that no text is selected when you check the count?
• Are you aware of the check box in the Word Count dialog which determines whether the text in footnotes/endnotes/text boxes is included in the count?
• What additional details about the document can you provide?